in the jungle.
The area had been pounded by B52 bombers but it was thought that the Viet Cong had returned. With the benefit of hindsight, it's almost certain that they had, since this is the area where we later found the tunnel complex that made 3 Field Troop famous.
But this early operation was a nonevent. We found a few booby traps and cleared a couple of villages. But we were all left with the feeling that if this was the war, we could handle it – the boredom was the worst of it.
It was then that I made my first observations on the calibre of the American troops we were supposed to be fighting alongside. My remarks, in an official Army report, were as unwelcome as they were misguided. This is what I said:
... The Australian soldier, compared to his US counterpart, is a long way ahead but the Australian Engineer is even further ahead than the US field engineer. This can mainly be attributed to the standard of training achieved by the Australian Army. There seems to be little or no discipline in the lower ranks and certainly no initiative is shown by anybody below the rank of sergeant ... One glaring example of lack of common sense occurred when a US engineer was found trying to pump up a wheelbarrow wheel with the air outlet forced over the grease nipple.
Some of the men of 3 Field Troop, when asked what their first impressions of me were, have said I was an "arrogant prick" – or variations thereof – in those early days. Well, I suppose the arrogance is there for all to read. In my innocence, I blithely sent off 15 copies of the report, with every Australian Engineer unit receiving a copy and six going to Army HQ. Little did I realise that copies may be passed on to our American allies.
The result was that all the copies were retrieved from their various recipients and I was given a dressing down about who I was allowed to send reports to and the topics I should be covering in those reports.
I am glad to say I would later revise my opinion of the American troops. And despite this first tangle with authority, I began to realise what a fortunate position I was in.
Because I had to serve two masters – 1RAR and 173rd Airborne Brigade – it ironically meant I had more, rather than less, control over what we did. And since we were establishing new operating procedures as we went, I had a degree of autonomy unheard of for someone of my rank in the field.
That meant that I could make sure 3 Field Troop were much more actively involved than engineers would normally have been. I wanted to be in the thick of it, as did most of the men. And what we did then changed the way engineers operate to this day.
In fact, it could have changed the course of the whole war.
3
WORK HARD … PLAY HARD
Whatever else you can say about engineers, they work hard. After the first month, two sections of 12 men each were sent out to do brigade work, while the rest stayed in the camp, half as the duty section – manning the machine gun posts and other basic soldiering – and the others working on the camp itself.
Those who went out to work for the brigade would be involved in everything from building shower blocks, kitchens and accommodation huts, mainly for 1RAR, to clearing bush around the camp perimeter and fairly major civil engineering works. In that first couple of months we built 10 helicopter pads, two kilometres of road and one small bridge.
Then they would then return to camp after a 10hour day to help with the work on our own stuff like proper toilets and showers and road works. Even when we'd been out on operations, that's what we'd be doing when the other boys were sitting down to write letters.
Meanwhile I was trying to get used to the fairly complex radio operating procedures, the codes, the jargon and all the rest of it. I had to keep up with all this so that I'd be ready when we were actually called into action and I spent a lot of time just listening to the other operations on the radio.
I had to train my batman, Les Colmer, on all the codes and map reading, so that he could keep things moving if I was killed or wounded. I always had the utmost faith in Les, although he has recently revealed that my faith was misplaced – he used to mug his way through.
"Most of it was over my head," says Les. "I didn't even know where the bloody Cambodian border was. If you showed me a map I'd say 'Yeah' but you couldn't sit me in the jungle and say oh it's over there four clicks that way. But it didn't worry me. I just drew up some notes and they'd give us the general direction. My main worry was how many thousand yards we were going to do a day.
"Basically, I bullshitted. I just faked it. Sandy used to carry his own map and I used to carry mine and sometimes he'd give me directions and I'd go and tell Staff Sergeant Laurie Hodge where we were going and how many men we needed. I just sort of played along with it and tried to keep the job.
"I wasn't very good at radio work, either. I remember the first time I used the radio over there we were going on a big operation and I couldn't remember Sandy's codename. So I just said, 'Is Captain MacGregor there? ' and the next thing they were screaming and yelling. I was supposed to say 'Is Sunray Holdfast there? ' (Sunray = Boss; Holdfast = Engineer). I had a lot of trouble."
Our second operation – and the first in which 3 Field Troop played an active role – began on October 23rd and was called War Zone D. The battalion was on a basic search and destroy mission. It was only going to take 3 days and we went along to help with the repair and maintenance of any bridges along the way, to prepare landing zones and gun areas and to demolish any tunnels or enemy installations we might find.
There were 17 of us on that one and they kept us fairly busy although there were no great dramas. Most of the time we were classifying bridges to work out what sort of weight could go over them, probably in preparation for a bigger operation planned for a later date. We also had to classify roads in much the same way.
The benefit from our point of view was to get a chance to get used to the countryside. But one day they found some tunnels, which created a bit of excitement. I remember being called forward and standing there thinking, "There's the tunnel, boys ... what do we do now?"
We'd heard about the Viet Cong tunnels all over Vietnam but up to that point none of us had actually seen one. We didn't know what to expect and I wasn't quite sure what to do. But I did know that I wanted to find out what was down there and I wasn't prepared to ask the men to do something I wouldn't do myself.
So, just in case the boys needed to haul me out again, I got one of the blokes to tie a rope round my ankles and then they lowered me headfirst into the hole, with a torch in one hand and a bayonet in the other. I was let down the tunnel with a guy after me and I didn't know what to expect. All I could do was prod the earth with my bayonet and shine the light to see if I could find anything. It doesn't matter how small the tunnel is you never know where it's going to turn around, you don't know what's around the bend. You don't know what's in the floor, you don't know if it's abandoned, you don't know if it's booby trapped and you don't know why the tunnel is there in the first place.
3/7
Our first ever tunnel in "War Zone D". Staff Sergeant Laurie Hodge is holding a rope tied to my ankles as I cautiously probed the floor, walls, and roof with a bayonet.
More often than not, a tunnel is just an escape run from underneath a house, ending up in a storm drain or a nearby rice paddy. This first tunnel ended up only about twenty or
